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Police Service In England And Wales Face New Challenges

Source: by Rick Muir, Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
Posted on: 29th November 2009

The time has come for radical reform to the police service in England and Wales as funding is set to be cut and the police face new challenges.

This report argues that there is a strong case for widespread changes to the way the police work: how they are paid, managed, trained and recruited.

It also argues for much greater integration of policing systems and processes across the country, for much greater focus by the police on the needs of the citizen and for a transformation of the organisational culture of policing, which remains far too risk averse and process driven.

None of these reforms can be progressed unless we tackle a wider set of problems that are caused by the way the police service is governed, organised and held to account.

Executive summary
The police are unique in having avoided major reform under both Labour and Conservative governments. This report argues that with funding set to be cut and with the police facing new challenges, the time has come for radical reform to the police service in England and Wales. There are two main arguments for reform:

1. – The world has changed.

Society has changed in a number of important ways, increasing the range of demands on the police and requiring them, in turn, to change the way they work. These changes include a transformation in the kinds of roles the police are expected to perform, the emergence of new kinds of criminal activity that require a different response and higher expectations of public services generally.

2. – Labour’s policing strategy, based on increased spending on the police alongside performance targets set from Whitehall, is no longer sustainable. Although it can claim credit for a significant fall in crime over the last decade, Labour’s approach to managing the police service over the last 10 years now needs to change. The Government’s policing strategy has been to spend more money on the police (increasing the number of police officers to record levels) and to drive up performance through the use of centrally imposed targets. This approach cannot continue: there is no more money to spend and the target regime reduced the ability of police forces to respond to changing local demands.

Moreover, while crime has fallen, police performance on a number of key measures has not improved: importantly, the number of detections per officer has fallen and public satisfaction with the police is lower than it was before Labour came to power. If the police are to deal with new challenges and prevent crime from rising again, they will need to change the way they work.

The report points out that a populist strategy of putting ‘more bobbies on the beat’ is no longer sustainable – and doesn’t deliver results. With public spending set to be cut, ippr argues that improvements can no longer come from increased funding and instead the police must change the way they work.

ippr found that although crime has fallen over the last ten years, most of that fall was due to good economic conditions rather than the impact of police work.  In fact, despite a huge increase in spending on the police (up by 21% between 1997 and 2007), on a number of key measures police performance has not improved:

  • Crime detection rates show little improvement over the last 10 years: 28 per cent of recorded crimes were ‘cleared up’ in 2008/09 – which is little different from the 29 per cent detection rate in 1998/9.
  • Although detection rates have improved since 2002/03 this is due to a rise in out of court sanctions for relatively minor offences.
  • Detection rates vary enormously from force to force, showing that performance in tackling different types of crimes is patchy across the country.
  • Detections per officer have fallen: whereas in 2003/04 each officer was detecting 10.2 offences a year, this has now fallen to 9.4 offences per officer.
  • Public satisfaction with the performance of the police service is lower than it was in the mid-1990s: the proportion of the public saying that the police do a ‘good or excellent job’ fell from 64 per cent in 1996 to 50 per cent in 2005/6, rising more recently to 53 per cent per cent in 2008/09.
  • Victims of crime who have direct contact with the police are less satisfied with them than the public as a whole: In 2008/09 the public as a whole were more likely to agree that the police were doing an excellent or good job (56 per cent) compared to people who had been a victim of crime in the last twelve months (45 per cent).

Areas for reform

There are four priority areas for reform:

  • We need to better equip the police workforce to deal with new challenges, involving changes to how the police are paid, how they are recruited, the roles they perform and the way they are managed.
  • We need to integrate information systems and processes across forces.
  • We need to improve the quality of the relationship between the police service and the citizen. This requires changes to the way officers are trained, the further embedding of neighbourhood policing, greater public access to police data and more use of social media to open up new lines of communication and collaboration between the police and the citizen.
  • We need to tackle an excessively bureaucratic and process-driven organisational culture. This means greater professional autonomy for officers, a problem-solving approach taken to crime and more space for innovation at the frontline. None of these reforms can be progressed unless we tackle a wider set of problems that are caused by the way the police service is governed, organised and held to account.

The governance of the police service causes four major problems:

  • It inhibits the capacity of the police to deal with local crime locally and to tackle serious and organised crime at the regional and national level.
  • It does not deliver value for money, producing far too much overlap and duplication.
  • It confuses lines of accountability, with a weak system of local accountability leading Whitehall to micro-manage police forces in a way that reduces responsiveness.
  • It blocks change and reform by empowering internal stakeholders, who are able to rely on sufficient public sympathy to shield themselves from the pressure to change.

This final problem is the most significant. It means that despite three decades of change across the public services, the police, almost uniquely, were able to defend themselves from the public service reform agendas of both Labour and Conservative governments.

As a result of powerful stakeholders blocking reform the Government has had to spend more money on an unreformed system which could be working in a much more productive way by doing things differently. The fact that we are now entering a period of fiscal restraint means that finding a way to unlock reform has become ever more urgent.

Our argument is that unless the governance system itself is transformed, any substantive programme of reform will suffer the same fate as those that preceded it: opposition within different parts of the service followed by a government ‘U-turn’ for fear of a politically costly conflict with the police. The first reform priority therefore has to be to design a system of governance that is more coherent and less
fragmented and that empowers local and national leaders to deliver change in the public interest.

Conclusions

A new system of governance is needed for the police service in England and Wales
that will do four things:

  • Enhance police flexibility locally while improving capacity regionally and at the centre
  • Reduce waste and inefficiency
  • Strengthen accountability
  • Facilitate change and reform throughout the service. Our recommended key changes are presented in the box below.

Key proposed changes to the governance of policing

  • All local crime priorities should be set at the local level, most importantly by strengthening the role of elected local government. Priorities would be set at three different levels:

- Reformed police authorities made up of senior councillors would set the budgets and priorities for each police force and hold chief constables to account for performance.
- Local authorities would directly commission key police services from their respective Basic Command Units.
- Local neighbourhood policing meetings would set the priorities for each neighbourhood policing team.

  • A National Policing Agency (NPA) should be established by merging the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) with those parts of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) that currently coordinate or deliver national policing services. The NPA would have powers to ensure that complex and serious criminal activity that crosses force borders was being effectively tackled through collaboration and to improve the efficiency of service delivery by forces.

Rick Muir, Senior Research Fellow at ippr said:

“After years of investment by successive Governments with little reform, police performance has not significantly improved.  Given that spending looks set to be cut, if the police are to effectively tackle crime in the years ahead, they will need to change the way they work.

“Unless the way the police are organised and governed is transformed, any substantive programme of reform will suffer the same fate as those that preceded it: opposition within different parts of the service followed by a government ‘U-turn’ for fear of a politically costly conflict with the police.

“The first reform priority therefore has to be to design a system of governance that is value for money, more coherent and less fragmented and that empowers local and national leaders to deliver change in the public interest.”

However, none of these reforms can be progressed unless we also reform the way the service is governed, organised and held to account.  This is because all previous efforts at reform have been blocked by a system of governance that is too fragmented and which gives a veto to too many people in the service.

About ippr
The Institute for Public Policy Research is the UK’s leading progressive think tank, producing cutting-edge research and innovative policy ideas for a just, democratic and sustainable world. Since 1988, we have been at the forefront of progressive debate and policymaking in the UK. Through our independent research and analysis we define new agendas for change and provide practical solutions to challenges across the full range of public policy issues. With offices in both London and Newcastle, we ensure our outlook is as broad-based as possible, while our Global Change programme extends our partnerships and influence beyond the UK, giving us a truly world-class reputation for high quality research.

About the author
Rick Muir is a Senior Research Fellow at ippr. His research focuses on the themes of democracy, citizenship and public services. His previous publications for ippr include A New Beat: Options for more accountable policing (with Guy Lodge), Pubs and Places: The social value of community pubs, The Power of Belonging: Identity, citizenship and community cohesion (with Ben Rogers) and Sticking Together: Social capital and local government (ed, with Halima Kahn). He has a doctorate in Politics from Oxford University and was formerly a local councillor in Oxford.

Acknowledgements
ippr would like to thank Cable and Wireless, Logica and the Local Government
Association for their generous support in funding ippr’s Future of Policing
programme, without which it would not have been possible. The findings of our
research are, however, our own and do not necessarily represent those of our funding
partners.

The author would especially like to thank Guy Lodge, Tom Gash and David Pinto Duschinsky for their contributions to the key arguments made in this report. Thanks also to Jeremy Crump, Andy Hull, Georgina Kyriacou, Barry Loveday and Kate Stanley for their comments and advice.

This report is the most recent output from ippr’s Future of Policing programme. Previous publications include The New Bill: Reforming the police workforce by Tom Gash (ippr, 2007) and A New beat: Options for more accountable policing by Rick Muir and Guy Lodge (ippr, 2008). Both are available to download free at www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports.

ippr also hosted the Fitting the Bill conference in June 2009 on the future of policing. This was generously sponsored by the National Policing Improvement Agency, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Association of Police Authorities.

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